Thursday, March 13, 2008

Today I wanted to show more of the process of "The Serenbe Project"http://www.serenbe.com/. I have posted an ad for interns. Last week I was contacted by the Redevelopment Authority of a small town located near where I live and they wanted to offer me space in a building that they will use as studios. The Auburn Rural Architectural Studio http://jcsm.auburn.edu/whatsHappen/RuralStudio.html has completed a plan for the arts district in Bessemer, Alabama. This was good news for me, because I knew if my intern project was successful, I would soon be out of space. I am meeting with the director of the project tomorrow and hopefully will be able to use the space if interns want to work at their leisure. This space will be invaluable to me.

The first thing that I will do is to work out a prototype in order to define the process. The mold material that I had originally intended to use is not refirable, so I have ordered a material that is refirable. In a large project like this, the expense of using a material that is non-refirable would be prohibitive.

In the photo above, I am rolling out "sausages" in order to "dam" the mold box. This ensures that the investment material will not "leak" between crevices in the mold box. After the mold box was made, it was shellacked. The mold box is a minimum of 2 inches larger than my pattern. The pattern is made of No. 1 Plasticene and after you get the material warm, it is fairly easy to work with. Plasticene is an oil-based clay which does not dry. That means that it is reuseable as long as it does not have mold material embedded in it.

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